Hallowed

who are only half human, might live at least twice as long, somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty years. So your mom would be a middle-aged angel-blood. She’d look like she was forty. Which she does.”

“Sounds like you have it all figured out,” says Christian.

She swallows. “I thought I did,” she says in an oddly flat voice. “But then I read this.” She flips a few pages in her notebook, then begins to read. “When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God— that’s angels; at least it’s largely interpreted as angels —saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.”

I know this passage. It’s the Bible. Genesis 6. Enter the Nephilim: angel-bloods.

But Angela keeps reading: “The Lord said, ‘My Spirit will not remain in man forever, for he is mortal, his days will be a hundred and twenty years. Then it goes back to talking about the Nephilim, when ‘the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them’ and all the ‘heroes of old’ stuff, and it occurred to me that something’s weird here. First we’re talking about the Nephilim, then God sets a limit on the life span of man, then we go back to talking about the Nephilim. But then I realized. It’s not a limit on the life span of man. That part in the middle isn’t about man. It’s about us. God wants us to be mortal.”

“God wants us to be mortal,” I repeat cluelessly.

“It doesn’t matter whether or not we’re capable of living for hundreds of years. We don’t live more than a hundred and twenty years,” concludes Angela. “I researched it all last night, and I can’t find a record of a single angel-blood, Dimidius or Quartarius, who’s lived longer. Every single one I’ve been able to find a paper trail on dies either before or during their hundred and twentieth year, but nobody ever makes it to one hundred and twenty-one.” Suddenly Jeffrey makes a choking sound in the back of his throat. He jumps up. “You’re full of crap, Angela.” His face contorts into an expression I’ve never seen on him before, wild and desperate, full of rage. It scares me.

“Jeffrey—” Angela begins.

“It’s not true,” he says, almost like he’s threatening her. “How can it be? She’s completely healthy.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. “Let’s all calm down. So we get a hundred and twenty years. No biggie, right?”

“Clara,” whispers Christian, and I feel something like pity from him, and then it all hits home.

I’m so stupid. How could I be so stupid? Here I am thinking it’s fine, a hundred and twenty years is fine, because at least we get to stay young and strong. Like Mom. Mom, who doesn’t look a day over forty. Mom, who was born in 1890. Margaret and Meg and Marge and Margot and Megan and all those strangers, those past lives she got to live. And Maggie, my mother, who turned a hundred and twenty a few weeks ago.

I feel dizzy.

Jeffrey punches the wall. His fist goes right through like it’s made of cardboard, spilling plaster everywhere, his blow strong enough that the whole building seems to shudder.

Mom.

“I have to go,” I say, standing up so fast that I knock over my chair. I don’t even stop to pick up my backpack. I just run for the exit.

“Clara!” Angela calls from behind me. “Jeffrey. . wait!”

“Let them go,” I hear Christian say as I reach the door. “They need to go home.” I don’t remember the drive back to my house. I’m just here, suddenly parked in the driveway, hands clenched on the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles are white. In the rearview mirror I see Jeffrey’s truck parked behind me. And now that I’m here, now that I’ve probably broken a dozen traffic laws to get here as fast as I possibly could, some part of me wants to drive away. I don’t want to go inside. But I have to. I have to know the truth.

Angela’s been wrong before, I think, although right now I can’t remember when. She’s been wrong. She’s full of crap.

But she’s not wrong.

It’s not Tucker’s funeral, in my dream of Aspen Hill Cemetery. It’s Mom’s.

I feel like I’ve been on the teacups at Disneyland, all vertigo, my head spinning even when the rest of me is holding still. My emotions are a jumbled cocktail of relief about Tucker, mixed with shock and crazy hurt, guilt and a whole different level of grief and confusion. I could throw up. I could fall down. I could cry.

I get out of the car and walk slowly up the steps to the house. Jeffrey falls in behind me as I open the front door and move through the entryway, past the living room and the kitchen and straight down the hall to Mom’s office. The door’s open a crack, and I see her reading something on her computer, her face the picture of concentration as she stares at the screen.

An odd calm comes over me. I knock, a gentle rap of knuckles on the wood. She turns and glances up.

“Hi, sweetie,” she says. “I’m glad you’re home. We really do need to talk about—”

“Angel-bloods only live a hundred and twenty years?” I blurt out.

Her smile fades. She looks from me to Jeffrey standing behind me. Then she turns back to her computer and shuts it down.

“Angela?” she asks.

“Who cares how we know?” I say, and my voice sounds sharp in my ears, shrill. “Is it true?”

“Come in here,” she says. “Sit down.”

I sit on one of her comfy leather chairs. She turns to Jeffrey, who folds his arms over his broad chest and holds his ground in the doorway.

“So you’re dying,” he says in a total monotone.

“Yes.”

His face goes slack with dismay, his arms dropping to his sides. I think he expected her to deny it. “What,